Should students be allowed to use dictionaries in class? This age-old question is growing more complex as smartphones proliferate, massively increasing the choice of dictionaries available, as well as the ease of using them. The teacher who takes a stand against dictionary use faces an uphill struggle when students can simply reach for their phones, not to mention that it can be impossible to tell if the student tapping away on their phone is genuinely using a dictionary, or is instead texting or whiling away the time on Facebook.
Very pretty, but no way to learn English.
Over-dependence on dictionaries frequently leads to problems. Students learn to distrust their own judgement and are reluctant to guess the meaning of unfamiliar words. They read at a slow pace, convinced that it is necessary to understand every word of a text in order to understand the text, and in consequence they do not learn whole-text reading skills.
Worst of all, if they are dependent on a bilingual dictionary or translator, their knowledge of English exists in fragments. Each word they learn connects back to a word in their L1 (whether or not that word is an exact counterpart), rather than connecting to other English words and forming a network. English for them is a field of individual words, growing out of the bed of their L1.
What students need is for their L1 and L2 to be like two floors of a building. There may be several staircases going between the floors, but if you are on the L2 floor, and want to move to somewhere else on that floor, you don't go downstairs to L1, walk across that floor and up another staircase to L2 again. Instead, you walk across the L2 floor, following the network of connections that you have made between words in that language. Careful use of a monolingual dictionary, whether paper-based, online, or available as a smartphone app, can encourage this, as long as students learn to use all the information in the dictionary entry, not just the spelling and the basic definition.
In my experience, very few students take the time to work out for themselves the meanings of dictionary abbreviations such as U or C for nouns, or T or I for verbs, let alone figure out the phonetic transcriptions or study the usages in example sentences. So, most students will need dictionary training in class, comprising advice on how to choose and use a good dictionary, and 'dictionary drills' to rehearse and reinforce good dictionary skills. For lower level students, a student dictionary at their level will be useful for basic vocabulary. On the whole however, my belief is that dictionary use is best kept for self-study, and that classroom work should focus on developing the students' own vocabulary strategies and judgement.
Let's try extending the building metaphor to see how far it will go: the L2 floor has to be built from scratch.
In the beginning there will be loads of scaffolding and ladders, with
rickety planks between them. There will be areas of the floor that
can't be reached, and the routes between the safe areas will be far from
comfortable. Metaphor still working? I think so. There will need to be extra
routes between the two floors - ladders, poles and ropes. Gradually you extend the scaffolding, and use it to put the floor down, removing the extra ropes and so on as you go.
Part 2 of my teacher development session moves on from Communication Games (see previous post) to Receptive Skills, in particular the sub-skills that students may miss out on developing if you just 'teach the book.' Again, for experienced teachers this will not be earth-shattering material, but for newer teachers I hope it will be a useful recap, and maybe even give some new ideas.
First of all, Listening
Most textbooks include listening activities where students listen to a recording repeatedly, answer questions, then check the correct answers. What they do not teach is listening skills. And how often in real life do you get the chance to hear every word of something 2 or 3 times over, with exactly the same pace, intonation and emphasis, until you capture every nuance of it? Book listening activities, however useful they may be in preparing for an exam (where you also typically hear everything twice) are a very poor imitation of real-world listening.
So how can students be helped to bridge the gap between graded recordings made by actors, and real-life speech with all its variety, not to mention messiness? What skills do they need to practise?
Active Listening is one important area. Imagine the difference between a classroom of students listening to a recording because they have to in order to complete a worksheet, and a group of people listening to something that interests, enrages, entertains, enthralls, or provokes them. Which group is listening better? Imagine also two conversations between friends: one in which A talks while B is silent and has a blank expression, and one where B responds to A constantly, with words, facial expressions, non-verbal expressions, but above all with their clear attention. Which friendship is likely to grow stronger?
In this video from Ted.com, Julian Treasure discusses why we all fail to listen, and recommends tactics to improve listening skills.
This video works well with high level classes to get them to think about how they listen, but even Elementary students can be taught the acronym RASA (Receive Appreciate Summarise Ask), and learn to apply these steps both when they listen to recordings, and in conversation.
Receive - Take it in Appreciate - Think about it, absorb it, what does it mean to me? do I agree? /Hmm, Really? - ways that we show we are listening Summarise - So you mean... Ask - Find a question to ask about what you've heard. (When teaching this method to students, there is no such thing as a stupid question. A tiny step in developing Active Listening skills is still a step.)
I've touched on Social and Emotional Cues above, which is another key area where students need practice if they are to be able to talk with native speakers without causing unintentional amusement or offence. Authentic resources are much better for this than textbook recordings made by actors, which typically have exaggerated intonation, and very few interjections or hesitations. Try using video of real conversations, such as this excerpt from the BBC documentary The British Family.
I showed this to a Pre-Intermediate class, without any preparation other than telling them that they would see two people being interviewed. After watching it, I asked them how the man and woman felt during the interview. The students were unanimous that in the first section of the interview, the man disagreed or was angry with what the woman was saying, because he was completely silent, and stood with his arms folded and a frown on his face, not looking at her. In the second section, he was still silent, but you could tell that now he agreed with her, because he smiles and makes eye contact with her, and at the end of the section he laughs. In the final section, they both speak, overlapping and interrupting each other, and both are smiling, so you know that these are positive interruptions, not rudeness. In other words, they
understood a great deal from the recording, without even looking at the
language.
Another area where textbook
listening exercises fall down, is that they ask you to listen for 6 things
during a recording, which will probably be spaced at fairly regular
intervals. In real life however, we frequently have to listen to a long
spiel of information, most of which is not relevant to us, without drifting off
sufficiently that we miss the One Detail that is not only relevant, but
frequently vital. Train announcements are an excellent example of this,
such as the one below.
Which platform is this train going
to be at? Is this the train for Arundel? If it is the train to
Arundel, where in the train do I need to sit?
(OK, so the visuals aren't great, mostly it's
someone's finger, but the audio is useful - you get some background noise, a lot of unfamiliar station names, and the answer you want towards the end of a long list. And if you get it wrong, maybe you won't get home tonight!)
I hope that some of the above has been useful - next time: Reading Skills!
(NB - I did not create any of the videos linked or embedded here, all rights remain with the creators.)
The following is based on my contribution to a staff development meeting at my college last night, if I had had more time, and if the IT equipment hadn't taken exception. There will be several parts - Part 1 focuses on Communication Games, while later entries will move onto using authentic resources to stretch students' Receptive Skills, and finally to using ICT for professional development and in the classroom. (It was a busy session - believe it or not I squeezed most of this into 40 minutes on the night, including the afore-mentioned IT trouble!)
I'm taking the opportunity now to expand my ideas a bit...
Part 1 - Communication Game
Learning should be fun, but it's all too easy for fun to become a higher priority than learning. Especially when we start out, we can think that the nuts and bolts of grammar - let alone spelling, paragraphing or register - are 'boring,' and 'too difficult' for our students. We want them to like us and enjoy the lessons, so consciously or otherwise, we skimp on the boring stuff, and pile on the fun. The result? Unchallenged, unmotivated students who are poorly prepared for using English in the real world, and may even end up complaining about our teaching style. "So and so's classes are fun, but I need to improve my English."
It's not that games are bad, but they do need to have a clear purpose - and some students will need to understand that purpose before they see any value in the game. So, what are some valid purposes?
First, the Warmer - for the beginning of the term, to help a new class to gel.
Everyone has their favourites, and one of mine is the Number Game. Every student thinks of a number that has some personal significance to them (try to steer them away from just choosing their age as it's so obvious). It might be their house number, their lucky number, the year their country got independence, or anything really. In small groups, students tell their numbers, and the group has to guess the reason. This game is good for giving students practice in asking questions and speculating (you could use it to gauge current ability before a relevant grammar lesson), and also because the students have totally free choice over what personal information they reveal, so it is less pressurised for them in a new class situation.
Next, games can be focused around producing particular Target Language.
A great example for this is the Blindfold Obstacle Course. A student is blindfolded, then the class and teacher arrange an obstacle course for them, using whatever is available in the room (pieces of paper on the floor that they must avoid treading on would be a minimalist version). The class then has to direct the blindfolded student on a particular route through the room. To avoid the louder students monopolising the directions, you could have a rule that each class member can only speak once, then has to wait their turn till everyone has given one direction.
This game of course practises the imperative and vocabulary for direction, but also could be used for prepositions (crawl under the tablecloth), phrasal verbs (pick up the hoop) and speaking with precision (shuffle forwards 3 inches, then turn 90 degrees to your left).
Another valid purpose for games is to enhance students' Confidence.
If you have a class with one or more very quiet students, try a Shouted Dictation. Divide the class so that half are at each end of the classroom, facing the opposite group. Each student is then paired with the one opposite them. One group are the readers, the other group are the writers. You then need to give each reader a different short text to read, which they have to dictate to their partner. If you want to make it more difficult, you can play music, or radio static if you're feeling really mean!
The readers are dictating different texts simultaneously, so it gets loud pretty quickly. The writers have to accurately transcribe the entire passage (including punctuation), so they will start shouting too, asking for repetition, spelling, and clarification. I have done this activity with a class which included a nearly inaudible student, and the results were impressive. For more confident students it can also be very beneficial in terms of pronunciation and clarity.
The activity above is helpful for students who feel underconfident in the classroom. However, sometimes there is the opposite problem: the classroom is too safe. Students produce language happily in front of their teacher and classmates, but freeze up in a shop, at work, or in a speaking test. So sometimes we need activities to help students Produce Language Under Stress, strange though that may sound.
For this, I like to use two Backwards Interview games. The first one is based on a classic Two Ronnies sketch:
In the EFL classroom version, the answers will probably not align so perfectly, but you get the idea! Students stand or sit in a circle, and ask questions around the circle. A asks B a question, B doesn't answer. B asks C a new question, C answers A's question. C asks D a new question, D answers B's question and so on. What usually happens is that someone takes a while to answer, by which time the next player has forgotten the previous question.
The second interview game is loosely based on the quiz show Jeopardy. Time A gives B an answer, which B has to think of a question for. Then B gives C an answer, C responds with a matching question, and so on. This is another game that's useful for practising question forms, and it can lead to some lively debate about whether a particular question and answer really go together.
Of course these are by no means the only possible learning purposes for games, but I hope that they are useful as examples. Please do comment if you would like to add any more game purposes for the EFL classroom, or suggest any tried and tested games.
This drama was created by a CAE class taught by one of my colleagues - over the course of 3 weeks, the students scripted, edited, practised and performed it, then found sound effects and incidental music for the final version.
I thoroughly recommend listening - it's hilarious! They've used a good variety of entertaining idiomatic expressions, and it's also great practice for understanding different accents. It also shows what's possible with a little creativity (I really wish this had been my class). The students really got into it, and the end result - well, listen for yourself.
(Drama contains drinking references, mild sexual innuendo, and gory horror - you have been warned)
Hotel Sunset!
Seham and Rachel are enjoying a quiet holiday at the Hotel Sunset,
while trying to dodge the local lothario, but things are about to go
very very wrong.
In honour of the NHS Reform Bill, here is a biased and partisan list of idioms that could be used for Speaking activities in English Language classes with a politics or current affairs theme. My own position on the matter may just become apparent from the choices of idiom.
At first, like many children, I said I wanted to be a teacher, but had no clear idea what the job entailed. It was just what I saw, day to day in school, from adults I (largely) respected. Then I had an epiphany during my A-Level years. I was working my socks off, nose to the grindstone, fingers to the bone, breaking my back, and all the other cliches. I was going through this massive, transitional stage of my life, longing for the day when I could leave school behind me and find out who I could be somewhere else. And then I realised that teachers lived through this every year - a constant cycle of teenage stresses, tantrums and hormonal breakdowns; same curriculum, same issues, same assignments, same same same same same.
Next, I counted the teachers in my family, past and present: 12 all told. Wasn't there something different I could do instead?
So I ran a mile, and spent the next several years saying I would never teach. (Repeat 'never' as many times as desired - I certainly did.)
But I couldn't deny that growing feeling that teaching had some unfinished business with me, or vice versa. Not in a school, certainly, but what about language teaching? I'd done some volunteer work, and found it... satisfying. Fulfilling. Intriguing.
Damn.
So I gave it a try.
Anyway, that's all history now. I teach, therefore I am a teacher. But please don't call me 'Teacher' - I'd far rather you used my name.
Is there anything left to say? Is there really a need to add more content to the groaning blogosphere? If so, does the good stuff get buried under an avalanche of the adequate, the outdated, the mediocre, and the best-forgotten? And is there a limit to the number of consecutive rhetorical questions a reader will tolerate before theatrically throwing up their hands and moving on?
My answer to all of the above will have to be a resounding 'Possibly'. For now let's just say that this blog malarkey seems appealing, that I'm an EFL teacher who loves the quirks of the English language, and that I'm immensely excited by the possibilities offered by new technology. In this blog I hope to share, collect and discuss my thoughts about teaching, technology, language and anything else that crosses my mind. (There may be cake. Even knitted cake.)
